This post evolves from my curiosity about ebook self-publishing and how the trend can help or hurt the unsigned, unpublished author.
Very organically, meaning by a natural outgrowth, the ebook self-publishing business has gained legitimacy with writers who feel the need to take their work to the streets themselves in an increasingly dismal marketplace. Writers are faced with many options and some tough decisions nowadays. Slug out the traditional route, clawing for an ever-shrinking publishing hole, or hold your breath and jump with two feet into self-publishing?
I do believe the stigma associated with self-publishing is as distasteful as you want to make it. If you take yourself seriously as a writer, you logically will also take a serious look at your publishing options. For me, it's been an evolution. First and foremost, there is the act of writing. There's the self-education to get better. Then, there's the coming to terms with feedback and criticism. Somewhere along the way, there is commitment. The last hurdle is the push for publication. For many writers, traditional publication basically means that their work is worthy. They've made it. The writing is obviously good. We think getting a book accepted by an agent or a publisher will validate our talent. I'm not so sure anymore about that last statement.
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| Brian Felsen, BookBaby President |
My doubt increased after I spoke to Brian Felsen, the president of an e-publishing startup called
BookBaby. Felsen let me hang out with him recently at the Portland, Ore., headquarters of BookBaby,
CDBaby and
HostBaby and unequivocally made the case for what he calls self-release. (Of course, we want release, in more ways than one!). In terms of economics and marketing, he sees self-publishing as the hands-down winner.
Granted, this is the
nice man with the gun who suggested the bus to Cartagena.
Disclosure statement: I took no gifts or gratuities to speak with him or to publish this post and the
transcript of our interview. I'll still have to pay the $99 to e-publish my book via BookBaby, if in fact I choose to do so. I simply went on a fact-finding trip, and he was nice enough to cooperate. Laid-back, no question. A man not afraid to use the word poopy in an interview. Sure, he's running a multi-million dollar company that is breaking into a competitive market, but he was still a nice guy.
BookBaby is new among the electronic book publishers, competing with the likes of
Smashwords and
CreateSpace. It has released only about 4,000 titles in the last year of doing business. Its competitors have somewhat different models, though I won't outline the pros and cons here. At BookBaby, you pay an upfront fee, a real person processes your manuscript by hand, and it gets distributed to all the major retailers. The writer keeps 100 percent of the profits after the retailers take their cut. BookBaby has the benefit of being a spinoff of the highly successful CDBaby, a 13-year-old company that is the largest distributor of independent music.
Felsen is an
artist and businessman. He writes poetry (no kidding), composes music and used to play rock 'n' roll. The way he sees it, self-publishing cuts out a lot of headaches.
"It doesn’t hurt you if you release your work now by
e," he said. "Either you can get it pulled down and then get traditional distribution
later or still give up the e-rights to it later, if you want to. Or, it’s the
calling card for you to get future works noticed, but you shouldn’t put
your career on hold and spend tons of money trying to go traditional with a
work that’s completed and drive yourself crazy if it’s not imminently
happening."
For e-rights, he says it's silly to let a publisher take them from you, especially when so little of the revenue from ebooks goes back to the writer. "There’s no warehousing or distribution, there’s really nothing. It’s
not rocket science. There’s nothing to it. The sort-of dirty little secret of
publishing is that publishers don’t add a ton of value in terms of marketing
your work to the readers. They market your work to book sellers. But so many
famous authors still have to go to book conventions themselves. They still have
to manage their social networking presence themselves, have a website and
Twitter accounts and reach out to fans and have contests and do all this stuff
that they do, but you’d have to that as an independent author anyway, so you
might as well keep the money."
His logic is this: The publishers and agents are already looking for plug-n-play writers. Why play their game? Do it yourself.
"Now, will traditional publishers look at you different?
Well, traditional publishers are going to tell you they’re going to look at you
differently because you are out there eating their lunch. So, you know, I talk
to people, to traditional publishers, many of whom I’ve interviewed on camera
for the
BookBaby blog, and they would, they’ll say, ‘Yeah, there’s a stigma to
self-publishing.’ Well, of course, ‘cause they’re taking an unreasonable cut with
unreasonable overhead, and they’re going out of business, so of course they’re
going to say that. But if you’re self-released, and you’re one of the top
sellers, or if you win awards, they’re gonna want to sign you so badly and so
fast, they’re not going to say, ‘Oh, yeah, he’s just writing, a family
memoirist.’ No, not at all."
I still believe publishers are looking for high quality. But I also agree that their model of selling to book sellers is dying. They already know that. Where does that leave us whimpering newbies? The outlook, according to Felsen, isn't all that rosy in traditional publishing.
"As bookstores are going away, as the publishing houses are consolidating,
the mid-tail author is becoming more and more abandoned. It’s like the
shrinking middle class. The mid-tier author is not getting the advances that
they were. They’re not getting the publicity that they were; there’s not the
outlets that there used to be; advances that are doled out are doled out over
three years in quarterly installments, and it’s still not really—the pot at the
end of the rainbow is a very small one nowadays, and it’s not for everybody."
The interview with Felsen is more indepth and worth a read. For every new author (and some of the old ones), every option is on the table. It may mean I'll need an attitude adjustment to worry less about
how my work ends up with readers and to focus more on the
real goal:
satisfied readers. And those readers will let me know whether or not they're satisfied, regardless of how I publish.
